Will The Right’s Next Pro-Life President Please Stand Up?

Politicians either don’t have opinions on the most important issues or they don’t possess the courage to express them. Either way, they’re in the wrong profession. 

Maybe this is why I hate democracy. No one says what they want to say, they only say what polls will give them permission to say. It’s like high school student council. They don’t lead the people towards the Truth, which is what you want from your leaders, instead they follow the popular whim of public opinion which is led by the prevailing cultural winds. There is nothing dignified about democracy. 

A lack of opinions or courage, however, is not the problem with former President Trump—he just happens to have the wrong opinion in this case. In a lame effort to separate himself from the disappointing Republican loss of the midterm elections, Trump recently posted on social media:

It wasn’t my fault that the Republicans didn’t live up to expectations in the MidTerms. I was 233-20! It was the “abortion issue,” poorly handled by many Republicans, especially those that firmly insisted on No Exceptions, even in the case of Rape, Incest, or Life of the Mother, that lost large numbers of Voters. Also, the people that pushed so hard, for decades, against abortion, got their wish from the U.S. Supreme Court, & just plain disappeared, not to be seen again. Plus, Mitch stupid $’s!

Here it appears the Right’s former pro-life hero and the “greatest pro-life president we’ve ever had” thinks the “abortion issue” was an inconvenient problem that cost us the election (those pesky babies)…and especially inconvenient were those who dared to double down on their coherent commitment toward protecting unborn human life, insisting on no exceptions (no example of whom personally comes to mind.)

What’s interesting though is that socially moderate candidate Dr. Oz and absentee father Hershel Walker (who allegedly paid for abortions) did not win their respective races. 

So, can Trump’s theory be true? I believe the reason we did not see the results we should have seen is because we did not run our best. And “our best” that we did run (e.g., J.D. Vance) were unwilling to go to the mat over abortion, and instead played a game of extremist hot potato with the opposing Democrat.

Vance said at the Ohio U.S. Senate debate that he’s “always believed in reasonable exceptions.” And while he did call out the fact that a ten-year-old girl should never have been raped by an illegal alien to begin with, he still went on record saying that that Ohio child and her family should have the option for abortion. Apparently adding the tragic weight of an abortion to the already tragic weight of a rape is a “choice” a ten-year-old can totally make. 

He also said, “Some minimum national standard is totally fine with me.” Minimum is the key word here. The standard is never when life begins, but always an arbitrary point of pregnancy. Here he could have taken the opportunity to advocate for a national abortion ban now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, but instead he opted to support individual state law. Of course, there were other things I think Vance could have communicated better about this issue, but let’s stick to exceptions for now. 

When it comes to exceptions, the reason it’s less coherent to make abortion policy that allows for them is because doing so doesn’t judge abortion as to whether or not it’s a just act; it judges abortion on the reasons a woman has for wanting one. But if abortion is an unjust act, the reasons a woman has for wanting one are irrelevant to the law, because abortion always deals with two humans. So if the unjust act is aimed at one of the humans (i.e. exceptions), it just dehumanizes the child by justifying the violent act of abortion as a legitimate and appropriate response to the violent act of rape or incest.  When it comes to exceptions, the reason it’s less coherent to make abortion policy that allows for them is because doing so doesn’t judge abortion as to whether or not it’s a just act.Tweet This

Arguing for exceptions implies it’s okay to terminate another life when the mother didn’t consent to the act that created it, essentially saying, “It’s a life worth protecting when the mother is against the child; it’s not a life worth protecting when the mother is also a victim.” Rather, in cases of rape and incest, we should treat both the mother and child as victims, instead of making the child the collateral damage of the initial traumatic event. Punishment must be directed at the rapist. 

The same logic follows in the conversation and debate surrounding when the “life of the mother” is threatened, except that it should be noted abortion is never required to save the life of the mother. Society should never pit a mother against her child, but a mother should always be willing to die for her child—that’s the test of a good mother and everyone knows it. 

Why would we ask a mother to die for her child? Why wouldn’t we? Who else would? If you’re not willing to die for your own child, you’re not willing to die for anything, and thus you cease to live for anything either. 

Mind you, this is also the call of fatherhood. And in a more civilized time, men dying for women was the call of manhood. Dying to self is the call of the Christian. But we moderns live for nothing and fear death, thus there is nothing for which we are willing to die. 

In an incredibly uninteresting and non-diverse panel on feminism hosted by Vice, one leftist feminist ironically pointed out the cognitive dissonance of the concept of exceptions, “The idea, the sort of like, moral setting of that it needs to be ‘rare’…is I think the delineation between that’s a ‘medical abortion,’ and that’s like a ‘fun abortion,’ is interesting because they’re all medical. It’s all a medical procedure.”

What she didn’t realize she was arguing was the principle of abortion, which is what we should be doing—not moralizing the circumstances surrounding conception or the reasons for a woman to have one. Either abortion is a good in and of itself or it’s not. Why should something be “safe” (safe for who?), legal (if it’s murder), or rare (if it’s good)? “Sometimes I think the Left is a better Church than we are,” a friend recently noted of the Left’s absolutism. I completely agree.  

Former altar boy and lapsed Catholic Mike Pence basically seconds what the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List said in response to Trump’s comments, but what did they say? Nothing more than a call to “state clearly the ambitious consensus pro-life position.” 

But what is that consensus beyond being opposed to late-term abortion? I get that where we are is Democrats in Congress having recently voted to allow babies who survive abortion to be left to die, but why should we meet the monstrous Democratic Party down in the dirt?

In my dissatisfaction with former President Trump’s attitude regarding abortion, I wanted to know what other potential contenders for 2024 had to say regarding exceptions, mainly Catholics Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Ron DeSantis. 

Rubio’s office referred me to his op-ed in The American Conservative, where he rightfully states that babies don’t “become more or less valuable based on proximity to election day.” But no mention of whether he supports exceptions.

The fight for life also remains a priority. Too many in our party, especially during the election, ran away from the abortion debate. Unborn babies don’t become more or less valuable based on proximity to Voting Day. At a minimum, we should align our nation’s laws with those of Western Europe by imposing reasonable regulations on abortions after four months. We must also do more to support mothers and their babies. 

There’s that “minimum” word again; it seems to be the standard these days. I found myself disappointed in Senator Rubio’s response, especially considering that he gave a speech on Common Good Capitalism not too long ago. What’s stopping him from continuing to break out the Catholic social teaching when it comes to the life issues? 

But at least Rubio’s office sent a response. I sent two emails and called Governor DeSantis’s office multiple times and received no response to my request for comment. 

Why does it seem any policy that regulates sex in some capacity is too sensitive to touch? Why is it only Democrats who are allowed to be sex extremists and set the tone as secular integralists? What’s wrong with being an extremist when you’re right and able to defend your position, anyway? These are things I’d like to know.